Data service providers provide many services related to the storing of data for thousands or millions of customers around the world. Typically, such data is stored in multiple data centers. These data centers maybe located in different geographical areas. In homogenous data systems, each data center may store copies of the same data. When a user tries to access data, a heterogeneous configuration, a large system of routers and traffic managers is utilized for the request to the appropriate data center. The system of routers and traffic managers may be very complex. The complexity of the system can result in delays, service outages, and very high expenses for the data service providers. In situations in which all data centers host all of the data and are active to both reads and writes while multiple users are accessing the data, routing can become further complicated.
To help alleviate these problems, some heterogeneous data systems employ a global traffic manager to assist in routing user data requests to the appropriate data center. For example, when a user accesses the Internet from a personal computing device in order to access user data stored in one or more of the data centers, the user request may be directed to a default global traffic manager associated with one data center which then resolves the user request to a different data center at which that user's data is stored. Because the user request is by default resolved by a global traffic manager associated with a first data center before being 46569.0606.8079858.1 redirected to the correct data center, latency is introduced into the system. This latency results in the user accessing the data more slowly. Furthermore, when traffic among the data centers is inefficiently handled, this results in data access delays and possibly unsatisfied customers.
What is needed is a method and system for providing access to user data stored in one or more data centers more efficiently.